I love this city and this coun­try when you can email the May­or of the cap­it­al, get a reasoned (if delayed) response and have things hap­pen.

This is the fol­low-up from Kerry Pren­der­gast regard­ing my ques­tion of how Wel­ling­ton City Coun­cil is going to par­ti­cip­ate in this year’s Earth Hour:

Dear Mike

Thank you for your email of 10 Janu­ary regard­ing Earth Hour.

I’m sorry it has taken a while to reply. We needed to wait until every­one returned from hol­i­day to dis­cuss the idea and make a decision.

You will be happy to hear that the Coun­cil is going to par­ti­cip­ate.

We are look­ing at get­ting the whole city involved. Cer­tainly, for safety reas­ons, we will keep street lights, traffic lights and oth­er essen­tial light­ing switched on – and obvi­ously there’ll be situ­ations where people will have to keep lights on.

But, the Coun­cil will switch off the tree lights in Ori­ent­al Bay; we’ll make sure all Coun­cil build­ings are “switched off” – and we hope busi­nesses might fol­low suit and switch off large neon signs and the like.

Thanks for tak­ing the time to send the inform­a­tion.  We too hope it will serve to gen­er­ate more thought and aware­ness about cli­mate change, both loc­ally and glob­ally.

Yours sin­cerely
Kerry Pren­der­gast

Wicked – and I’m sure Ray Api­hene-Mer­cer helped out

And very quickly in response to my ques­tion of “Will there be any pub­li­city (to Wel­ling­ton com­pan­ies espe­cially) to let them know how they can help?”, this from Shar­on Wil­li­ams, (Seni­or Com­mu­nic­a­tions Advisor, Office of the May­or):

Hi Mike

Kerry just asked me to respond to your latest email. I can con­firm that we will be put­ting out a media release encour­aging indi­vidu­als and busi­nesses in Wel­ling­ton to sup­port Earth Hour. I will make sure you receive a copy so you can pub­li­cise it on your blog.

Regards
Shar­on

What can I say – pretty cool eh!

And now it’s your turn – SATURDAY 29th MARCH, 8pm-9pm – turn off everything you can but start with the lights.